Thanksgiving night, the day after they were all found in the charred house, Sarah went to the grocery store. On a good day, she’d get lost in there, since Gordon primarily did the shopping. Now she was in a daze, all those relatives around for the holiday and life as they knew it over, yet they were all still somehow required to engage in the simple act of being a human: to eat, sleep, bathe, dress. They had Thanksgiving dinner that year at Perkins, in near silence. She figured no one would be at the store on Thanksgiving night, so she ran in and there at the checkout line was a former coworker standing in line with her own daughter. The woman said hello to Sarah, wished her a happy Thanksgiving. Sarah acknowledged the greeting; she does not remember how. The woman introduced her daughter and said how it was so nice to have the grandkids and the whole family in town. She pulled out pictures of her grandchildren and showed them to Sarah. So adorable. And, by the way, did Sarah have grandkids?
Well? Did she?
Just a day before, she’d had four. Now she had two. Did that mean she had four or two? What was the mathematical calculation of a murder plus a murder plus a murder? She didn’t know how to answer. I do … I did. Four, now two. I lost them. She was blurting things; she didn’t know what.
Them? Sarah remembers the woman saying. Both of them?
And Sarah said the words aloud for the first time: their father killed them.
It was a national story already, from Billings to Salt Lake City to Spokane.
And the conveyor belt stopped, and the cashier came out from behind the register and wrapped her arms around Sarah and the four women hung there together in the fluorescence of the store, suspended in a kind of agony that had no words.
In the aftermath of this magnitude of loss, you take a different shape in the world. Michelle’s family did exactly what Campbell did when she learned of Annie’s death: they asked themselves what they missed, how they could have intervened. The family blamed themselves. Turned their pain inward. Sally, Paul, Alyssa, Melanie, Gordon, Sarah, Ivan … all of them carry the specter of these questions like millstones. Sally gained weight and she aged overnight. Alyssa went into a haze, fought with Ivan, tried to capture Michelle in an artwork she tweaked compulsively, drawing and erasing the same lines over and over again for years as if she were imprisoned in the paper. Sarah and Gordon lived in the shallow space between grief and guilt, in that private eternal purgatory. “We lost them all, like they did,” Sarah says, referring to Michelle’s family, “but we have all the shame.”
Sally had dreams. Endless dreams that went on for years. She dreamt of Michelle and the kids and things would happen in her house that she could not explain: a toy that Kyle used to play with would suddenly go off when it hadn’t worked in months. And she’d feel his presence. Something would brush her hand and she would know Michelle was there.
Melanie was pregnant and so Sally, who had been a grandmother and was now no longer a grandmother, would be a grandmother again in a matter of months. Mitchell, they’d name him. A nod toward the memory of an aunt he’d never know.
The ripple effect of Michelle Monson Mosure’s death is still felt in Montana today. On one of my many trips to Billings to talk to Rocky and Michelle’s family, case workers, and police, I went into the Billings district attorney’s office. Today, the current district attorney is a baby-faced man with pale blond hair named Ben Halverson. On the phone, when I said I wanted to talk about Michelle’s case, he paused a moment, and then he said, his voice choked up, “That’s the case that haunts me today.” Ben Halverson was a teenager at the time Michelle was killed. He never knew her. Never met anyone from her family. In person, he told me he didn’t have any kind of experience with domestic violence in his own background. He grew up going to the country club with his parents, where no one talked about family violence. But her death drives his work.
The day I went to talk to Ben Halverson, Stacy Tenney showed up with a stack of domestic violence files on her lap. She’d gone over them again in preparation to meet with me, showing who they’d prosecuted and how. The progress they’d made, in a sense, since Michelle’s death. In person, she is soft and quiet, the kind of graceful woman you imagine might have once spent years in ballet classes. A silk shirt fluttered over her. She told me how much Michelle’s death just sideswiped her. She went over the files again and again, tried—much like Michelle’s family—to see what she’d missed. And what she missed was what Michelle didn’t tell her. “I’m not sure I would do anything different today,” she said. And as she said it, it seemed to almost physically pain her. It was her office that dismissed Sally’s charges on the same docket as Michelle’s. Though the police were the ones who wrote the initial report, downplaying the severity of the situation and not giving her office much to use in order to charge Rocky in the first place. I thought it was an act of bravery for her to even agree to talk to me.
Sally drove me over to the elementary school Kristy and Kyle had attended. There is a tree there, planted in a corner of the grounds, dedicated to Kristy and Kyle, and a bench for meditation and a plaque with their names engraved in it. Kristy’s teacher was so grief-stricken that she took a leave of absence from the school for the remainder of the year. Sally says sometimes she’ll come across a library book that one of her living grandchildren has, and it’ll have Kristy’s or Kyle’s name in it from long ago, when they once checked it out, and it’ll be like a little electric charge on her skin.
One night, a year or so after their deaths, Sally dreamt of Michelle across a river where she was baptizing herself, and she felt a kind of burning in her ear. “I used to pray all the time after their deaths, ‘Please let them come to me,’ ” and now she felt this burning and this compulsion to go upstairs to Michelle’s old room, and there was Kristy, and she said to her Bugga, “We’re okay. My daddy killed himself because he wasn’t very happy.” Sally said it was comforting to her.
Paul had wanted to raze the house after Rocky killed everyone, but Sally said the city of Billings wouldn’t allow it, and so he sold it for practically nothing to get it off his hands and out of his life. The new owner called Sally one day, said he’d sandblasted the walls to get the soot off, and there were little tiny footprints in the soot. “I know the spirit world now,” Sally told me. “I never believed in all that before.”
Alyssa said she had one salvation dream after another about the kids, about rolling them into carpets, hiding them in mattresses or cupboards, anything to keep them from Rocky. She drew a picture of Michelle, but she couldn’t get the nose right, and she began to work on it all the time, erasing it, redrawing it over and over until one night she was alone and she heard her name whispered, and she swore the picture smiled at her, and she stopped working on it after that. She drove up to where they used to camp, Michelle and Rocky and the kids, and she took a picture of the woods, and later, when she had the photos developed, she saw Michelle’s face in the tree with her arms around the kids, and Rocky and Bandit were there, too.
Michelle was buried with her children in the same casket, oversized, with her arms wrapped around each of them. Alyssa shows me a picture one night, and the three of them lay there with their eyes closed, and it felt for a moment like Michelle was my sister, too, and I had lost her, and I had to look away from the picture. Alyssa had a book called Life After Trauma and she read the whole thing and took all the quizzes in the book, and the book told her what she already knew: that she was struck down by grief. That she had post-traumatic stress. That she couldn’t stop missing her sister.
Sally said she couldn’t live in her house anymore, the one where she’d raised her three daughters. It was too painful. And Alyssa told her she couldn’t live anywhere else but that house, and so she bought it from her mother, and it’s where she lives still today. Sally is down the street. Melanie, who has been clean and sober for several years now, just bought her first house not far away in Billings, and Sally thinks this is one of her life’s greatest reliefs, that Melanie will be okay after all and the drugs won’t claim her and she won’t lose another of her daughters.
Ivan says he and Alyssa fought and fought, and eventually they broke up. He says the murders made his relationship with Alyssa untenable somehow. She was the love of his life and Rocky’s actions destroyed his life, too, at least for a while. “They hated [Rocky],” Ivan said, of Alyssa’s family, “understandably. But he was my childhood friend. He wasn’t always that way.” Ivan gained weight, drank himself into oblivion for a few years, and then found his way out again, back to life. He has his dogs, shared custody of a daughter, his wonderfully delicious smoked meat, his career, and his house, and he’s kind of okay now.
Sarah and Gordon retreated. She says for a year almost no one mentioned the murders at her job, even one of her coworkers that she’d thought was one of her closest friends. He told her much later how he never knew what to say, so he said nothing. Every day she’d come home to a silent house and a silent husband. They couldn’t talk about it. They couldn’t grieve. They couldn’t share their pain. They were just stuck there, like someone had frozen them where they stood. They couldn’t find any way to heal. Sarah saw a therapist, but Gordon clammed up. “He became more and more withdrawn, and he just shut down,” Sarah says. “And finally one day I said to him, ‘I just can’t take it. Walking in this house at night is like walking into a black cloud.’ ”
And she packed up and even though she and Gordon had been married for decades by then and she couldn’t imagine her life without him, she left. She rented herself a condo in town and told him she wasn’t coming back. “These kinds of things break families,” she says. “I didn’t want to get divorced, but I just could not keep living that way.”
It snapped something inside him. Something that maybe said he’d already lost so much, he couldn’t lose her, too, and so even though talking and opening up was more or less a tectonic shift for a man like him, he hauled himself to therapy, and he got on antidepressants, and the two of them also got counseling. It was something he thought maybe he should have done a long, long time ago. During the time Sarah was living separately from him, he went to her apartment, and he’d take her out on dates trying to win her back, and for six months she told him she didn’t know yet if she’d ever return to him. So he just kept at it, dating his own wife, wooing her. Her friends told her it was the craziest separation they’d ever seen. And the therapy helped. He’d talk a little about it to her. Not much, but given his silent stoicism it was a lot for him, and Sarah recognized it and saw how hard he was trying and how much he was hurting. Eventually, she returned. And they planted a little garden way in the back of their yard with whimsical things the kids would have liked. A colorful tin turtle, a bird feeder made from an old license plate, a metal goat painted white. They planted the Russian sage and bleeding hearts for Michelle. In the middle of it all the small boulder I had seen from far away. Forever In Our Hearts. Gordon Edward “Rocky” Mosure. He has no grave site. He was cremated, and they didn’t know what else to do. He’s far away from anyone, and I thought of Paul Monson and how he described the color white. A color all on its own. The best choice for when you don’t know what you’re doing. Rocky is hidden from nearly every view except theirs, in that “memory garden,” permanently planted at their home.
So they all searched for ways to go on, to stay among the living. Sarah eventually volunteered at the local domestic violence shelter in Billings. She’s not religious in any way, but she said sometimes when she sees a rainbow she believes it’s the kids. “It’s bullshit, but you take what you can get,” she says.
And Sally eventually read something in the Billings newspaper that would come to offer her a measure of comfort out of the senseless deaths of Michelle and Kristy and Kyle. Something that would make their deaths mean something to many people beyond their own family members. So she got in her car and drove two hours to Bozeman to find a man named Matthew Dale.